We estimate the degree of amp;apos;stickinessamp;apos; in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a...

We show that an estimated tractable ‘buffer stock saving' model can match the 30-year decline in the U.S. saving rate leading up to 2007, the sharp increase during the Great Recession, and much of the intervening business cycle variation. In the model, saving depends on the gap between...

To predict the effects of the 2020 U.S. CARES Act on consumption, we extend a model that matches responses to past consumption stimulus packages. The extension allows us to account for two novel features of the coronavirus crisis. First, during lockdowns, many types of spending are undesirable...

Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption “habits” to explain the substantial persistence of aggregate consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...

This paper formulates a back of the envelope approach to study the effects of monetary policy on household consumption expenditures. We analyze several transmission mechanisms operating through direct, partial equilibrium channels—intertemporal substitution and net interest rate exposure—and...

This paper presents a simple new method for estimating the size of 'wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the well-documented sluggishness of consumption growth (often interpreted as 'habits' in the asset pricing literature) to distinguish between short-run and long-run...

This paper argues that the versions of both permanent income and life-cycle theories which have recently become fashionable are inconsistent with the grossest features of cross-country and cross-section data on consumption and income. There is clear evidence that consumption and income growth...

Since the foundational work of Keynes (1936), macroeconomists have emphasized the importance of agents' expectations in determining macroeconomic outcomes. Yet in recent decades macroeconomists have devoted almost no effort to modeling actual empirical expectations data, instead assuming all...

Economists working with numerical solutions to the optimal consumption/saving problem under uncertainty have long known that there are quantitatively important interactions between liquidity constraints and precautionary saving behavior. This paper provides the analytical basis for those...

We examine the relationship between income growth and saving using both cross-country and household data. At the aggregate level, we find that growth Granger causes saving, but that saving does not Granger cause growth. Using household data, we find that households with predictably higher income...